Professional educators in the classroom, library, counseling center, or anywhere in between share one overarching goal: ensuring all students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be productive, engaged, citizens. This regular feature explores the work of professional educators--their accomplishments and their challenges--so that…

Drawing on data from a series of semi-structured interviews this article reports on findings from a research project focusing on the responses of two local authorities and their secondary schools to the Academies Act 2010. The article considers the background and the development of the education system in both localities. It goes on to focus on…

The original vision of a charter school called for heavy doses of professional teacher contribution throughout all aspects of curriculum and administration. Unfortunately, that is not how charter schools have evolved. Until now. The Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools is the first union-sponsored entity created for the sole purpose of…

As an early pioneer of market-led institutional reforms and New Public Management policies, New Zealand arguably has one of the most "neoliberalised" tertiary education sectors in the world. This article reports on a recent academic dispute concerning the attempt by management to introduce a new category of casualised academic employee…

This article describes how one local teachers' union branch has developed an active and imaginative campaign as it has challenged both national education policy and also the very specific attacks on schools in the community. By connecting local and national issues, and by linking struggles on pay and pensions to wider questions of policy, the…

The problems of public education are not that America's classrooms are filled with too many bad teachers or too few smart ones. Instead, policy makers are paying too little attention to mobilizing the many experts teaching today who could lead in powerful ways. Enter the teacherpreneur, who teaches students for a career and has "the…

For more than a generation, education leaders have advocated for policies at federal, state, and district levels to support the spread of teacher leadership. And yet, teacher leadership has not taken hold in either a strategic or systemic way. Why? Perhaps, as Atul Gawande said of the medical industry, while good ideas abound, not all of them…

This article describes a teacher-led school "Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy" (MSLA) that is part of the Denver Public Schools. At MSLA, teachers collaborate to make authentic and substantive decisions about how the school operates and seek to meet each student's needs. At teacher-led schools, teachers hire their own…

Context: The documentary film about U.S. education reform, "Waiting for 'Superman'," was met with acclaim and controversy when released to theaters in 2010, and again when launching its grassroots "host a screening" campaign in 2011. The campaign ran concurrent with 2011 state legislative sessions, during which…

The aim of this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on teacher professionalism by analyzing the professional strategies of Sweden's two teachers' unions from an organizational perspective. Drawing on institutional theory, the article argues that the teachers' unions' focus on strategies of professionalization has…

This chapter addresses ways college union professionals can establish partnerships and strategies for establishing fundraising and philanthropy initiatives within their organizations.

This chapter examines the current state of college unions at small colleges and offers a forecast of their future.

Background/context: Over the past 40 years, the composition of the professoriate has changed substantially across all institutional types. Once predominantly tenure track, now nontenure-track faculty (NTTF) constitute more than 70% of the faculty. While these major changes have occurred, we know little about key stakeholders' views…

In this article, Richard Lee Colvin, provides an uplifting history of the current vice president and next President of the National Education Association (NEA), Lily Eskelsen García, the first Hispanic head of the nation's largest union. Colvin describes Garcia as a powerful labor and political leader. Colvin describes NEA's beginning in…

Older people suffer discrimination in the labour market, in that their chances of finding employment if they lose their jobs are small, and the longer someone is out of the labour market, the harder it is to return. Although they often do possess the technical and transferrable skills required, these are not always recognised. Those who remain in…